I'm trying Mint 14 Cinnamon after having used LMDE for a bit. I use the non-free nvidia drivers because for whatever reason, the nouveau drivers won't run cinnamon using my card (gt 520.) Anyway, on LMDE after I install the non-free driver, removing libdrm-nouveau1a is no big deal, on regular mint however, it lists a lot of dependencies (well over a hundred) that seem incorrect to me (things like mintsystem and other things that would render the system unusable if they were removed.) Why is this? I know that none of these things actually depend on libdrm-nouveau1a because there are no such dependencies in lmde.

show that plymouth depends on this package. Running the same command for plymouth shows other packages depending on plymouth, and so on, and so on, probably to well over a hundred of your packages

So that explains why hundreds of packages will be removed if you remove libdrm-nouveau1a, but I can't answer why plymouth needs this package. Then again, this is a library with an installed size of 86 KiB, so perhaps don't spend much more time on it.

Thanks for the info. Upon further review, it looks like 357 packages depend on it on a fresh install (which is nearly the entire system.) I suppose I just won't worry about it given it's size, but it is pretty weird. The dependency issues must be coming from ubuntu as it is pretty trival to remove form debian stable or testing.